I met a man in a pub last week and introduced myself as a critic. He was so excited to talk about all the artists he loved but I had to break it to him that I wasn’t excited about this stuff anymore. I actually said that I’d been feeling heartbroken lately — that this thing I’ve been writing about for ten years is feeling further away than it used to. The wild fires artists make are getting harder to find with less money for experiments, less space to do things with no expectations. The only art I really see these days has been packaged and sanctioned and straightened up by the museum. But I know I’m looking for fire in all the wrong places.

So I go to the circus. I’m sitting in a sold-out, humid tent in the middle of Aintree Racecourse with a thousand kids and their parents. It’s a cold day but under the big top, I have to roll a water bottle across my cheeks. Smoke machine, wires, crossing lights. I haven’t been to one of these since I was a kid. Whatever happened back then, it left me with the idea that a circus is a space where people do things no normal person would. A corner of art that deals in physics, double dares, performance, mortality. I went hoping the art inside the circus was as free as I’d remembered it being because I wanted to write about that. I wanted my writing to be free as well.

I did get brief moments of that. A girl tucked inside a hoop pulled high, all muscle. She was making a pendulum curl, controlling time, while the tented ceiling made me forget how far away the sky really was. Then again when a huge metal structure that looked like handcuffs was pulled on stage. Two men either end in fixed hamster wheels synchronised their running so that it rotated. I looked it up later. It’s called the Wheel of Death; the men took turns climbing out of the safety of the wheel to skip on the outside of the frame, just managing to climb back in before the ground flattened them.

And then before the show came to an end, one last structure was brought out. This one, the Globe of Death. We watched two men enter a spherical metal cage on dirt bikes. It barely looked big enough to fit one, never mind two, and they drove fast, crossing paths. A tight dance of near misses. When a third bike entered the ring, the audience leant forward. I read that the centripetal force on the body means riders can lose some of their vision when they’re upside-down at the apex. I read the metal grid sometimes comes apart, bikes falter. The last death in one of these happened just two years ago in Italy.

I only really want to describe those stunts. What I haven’t said yet is that this show was 2 hours long, baggy, and replete with holiday entertainer dancing. It lacked story, structure, and there was no specificity. It was themed after Kpop Demon Hunters but only in the sense that Gandey’s put some wigs on the women and enjoyed their license of, what, three and a half songs off the soundtrack? There was also the fact that during the intermission, parents could pay £4 to take a picture of their kid with a giant Labubu mascot that had haunted silver mirrors for eyes. And they did. There was a whole queue.

I know it’s just a business putting on events and borrowing someone else’s IP to sell tickets to families needing something to do on a bank holiday. A contained trade. It’s not fair to expect more as the secret art critic in the audience, but there’s disappointment on my end and it feels familiar. It makes me think of myself as a teenager excited by the surrealism of Lady Gaga only to come up against the hurdles of constant product placements in her music videos, and still, knowing they must be put there to pay for the very thing I was trying to enjoy.

When the circus ended, I walked over popcorn making a carpet across the grass, and saw candy floss pressed back into dark pink sugar at the bottom of transparent plastic bags. I know visual artists who tell bare-faced lies about the kind of art they really want to make in order to fit specific opportunities, and I know writers who accept the terms of existing IP to write other people’s stories because they have no luck trying to write their own. For artists to make rent, they have to compromise on these things all the time. For a touring circus to survive in this day and age, it must pray to the giant Labubu God. £4 a prayer.

So dark that the best part of the two hour show was when three men on tiny motorbikes looked like they were about to die. I didn’t want them to die, though that has to be part of it. The circus just worked best when I got to witness a performance that had nothing to do with anything else. A performance so sharp it managed to make everything else stop — because that’s the feeling I miss, when good art makes you lean forward. It’s just that this tie-in shit makes me lean back, because really, I don’t want art to have to sell itself. I don’t want to see the mechanisms keeping the fire going.

And so, if art is not free even in the circus, I wonder where I should go next.

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-> uh oh now it’s my turn to show you the mechanisms that keep the fire running: the patreon link so you can join our discord community & here’s our book Poor Artists